Saturday, June 21, 2008

Google Code Jam is back!! After a couple years of running off the TopCoder platform they took time out to build their own platform. Wow, it looks exciting! More than $80,000 in cash prizes, top 500 to compete at their nearest Google office (which for us in SA equates to a wonderful trip to Europe :-D) and 100 finalists gathering in the famous Mountain View office to shoot it out for the grand prize of $10,000.

Google sure have put a lot of time and effort into Code Jam and the results were evident in the beta contest (yes I know, Google call everything beta!) they ran a couple months ago. They have made the problems all data problems which opens things up greatly such as allowing you to use any programming language whatsoever. All you do is submit your program's output, like you do with the IPSC if you competed in that one.

The qualification round is on 17 July. It goes on for a full 24 hours with the sole purpose being to discard those who are just faffing around and get sweet bugerall. Getting a single problem correct will be sufficient to progress to the main knock-out rounds, which you will have the choice of several days and times. There are a total of three online knock-out rounds (excluding qualifiers) before the two on-site events. So it's big, and serious stuff.

And if you're from South Africa, tell me that you've registered and I will add you to our local standings. Watch this space for more competitions from Google, local South African ones in particular! I was recently awarded the position of Google Student Ambassador at UCT, so I have inside knowledge. ;-P